I'm honestly not sure how pricing and licensing will work yet, but there will be some way to try it for free. Maybe something like Docker Desktop: free for personal use, license required for companies? That seems like a risky bet as an indie dev.

There's also the whole question of one-time purchases vs. subscriptions. Subscriptions seem like the optimal model for this, so I'm not sure how to accommodate people who just don't like them.

Would love to hear if you have any thoughts on how it could be done to reach as many users as possible.

Just do whatever you're doing in docker natively in macos. Python, Nodejs, Ruby, Rust, Postgres, etc can all run as native macos processes.

The big advantage (aside from performance) is that you gain access to all the OS-native debugging capacities. You can just look at files, open multiple terminal sessions in the same folder, use Profiler, click the debug button without special configuration in your IDE, and so on. All without needing to think about VM images, docker containers, networking and all that rubbish.

The downside is you need to set up a second build environment (which might not match your deployment environment). Unless you're doing something truly special, setting up a macos-native build environment is usually pretty easy. Its normally just a few "brew install" / "npm" / "gem install" / "cargo build" etc commands away from working.

> certainly a pain to just keep it updated.

> Linux and it's a lot of pain to setup.

If you're not using Linux, how are you justifying these claims?

> certainly a pain to just keep it updated.

Excluding the boot time for both, MacOS takes between 15 and 45min to update. Linux is a few seconds. I suspect that the only OS that has a more ridiculous update process than MacOS is Gentoo.

WSL 2 is a game changer because it makes all the Linux centric dev tools available to Windows without setting up virtual machines or other such nonsense, even running graphical applications these days. The only major pain point I've run into (that isn't "I prefer Linux") is the lack of IPv6 support within WSL 2.

If you avoid buying Nvidia hardware, Linux generally "just works", unless you use Windows-only software (which macOS also suffers from) or choose to make your life harder by installing Arch or Gentoo. Ubuntu's snap is a pain for power users who want to hack on their Linux system but if all you want to do is develop or do work stuff, it just works out of the box.

There was one developer in our team using Mac. Everyone (>20 people) else were using Linux. Mac was a lot of pain to setup.

Linux is the best balance between coding, utility tools and "other work stuff".

Windows is not even considered for development, it falls badly in the coding & tooling department.

So in our company almost every dev uses Linux (except this one hipster using Mac) & marketing team use Windows

Linux is not a pain to setup.

I am a .net developer and run Debian linux on my work laptop since ages. Keeping the OS and most of the software up-to-date is just "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". Microsoft has Debian packages for teams, skype, powershell-core, .net (core), azure-cli. Google has Debian packages for chrome. I use a lot of JetBrains' tools and keep those up-to-date using the JetBrains ToolBox. Where I work, we use Google workspace and Slack and I use those through chrome.

Just to be clear, most of my development is currently done on Linux using Rider, but I do have a Windows VM (on KVM) for older projects that run on .NET full.

The issues I come across, are related to our customers. For example when I am on location and need to connect to external hardware. One example is to connect wirelessly to a WiFi Direct display: this does not work for me and I did not investigate if there are drivers available or not. Another example is DisplayLink to use an external display through a dock: this I checked and there are drivers available and I did have it working at some point, but it broke after a kernel upgrade and it's too much bother to fix it again. Also for some customers we can connect remotely to their systems over VPN, but not all VPN solutions are available (or work out of the box) on Linux.

In any case, for my day-to-day work, I don't have any issues at all on Linux and I believe it's very very capable for coding, tooling and other work stuff. I definitely prefer it above Windows and Mac.

That maybe used to be true. But today, Windows is that OS. In one OS, I can freely develop in Windows, Docker, WSL2, including near seamless integration of apps, browsers, and even GUIs. And with VS Code, I basically have any OS except macOS (but who cares?) at my fingertips in a single interface. The dev experience is by far the lowest friction between Windows and macOS.

And Windows has superior support for external hardware. macOS refuses to work well with anything that doesn't have Apple on the box.

Given the option, I rather spend my day on VS than XCode, and C#/F#/C++ than Swift/Objective-C, but to each their own I guess.

And then there is the whole thing about where macOS Server end up.

That's more perception than reality, often from people who simply don't know how to use Windows.

Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and IntelliJ IDEA blow any Linux text editor out of the water for developer productivity.

For Linux workloads there is the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2), which now even supports GUIs with GPU acceleration!

Visual Studio Code can even operate in "remote" mode where it tunnels into a Docker container or Linux server and acts as-if the remote target was the local machine.

On Windows, x86 and x64 Linux Docker containers run in process isolation at full speed, unlike on Macs where there is CPU emulation required.

This is absolutely false. Windows is a perfectly fine development environment and has perfectly fine tooling. You just need to embrace powershell, windows tooling, and use cross platform tools. Too many devs put themselves in a corner by relying on posix shell or posix only tooling.

If you do user space programming your host OS should never matter. In my 10 years of programming the only time the host OS mattered was when I was writing Linux drivers.

But overall it's actually worked out surprisingly well because there's something for everyone - developers get *Nix On The Desktop but with an actual support story, and the non-technical users get a happy bubble OS that holds their hand.

Linux code churn and distro fragmentation makes it fundamentally unsupportable in the vast majority of workplaces (outside very controlled server environments/etc - talking desktop use here) and for the vast majority of users. The code churn makes the support story (polish and documentation) impossible and the distro fragmentation means that there's 50 different solutions to the same problem. The Bazaar and the Cathedral doesn't mean the bazaar is better in all situations, a random non-technical business analyst is never going to learn how to build Arch or install Gentoo and a really good streamlined, polished Cathedral Experience is much more suitable to the business environment. That's the fundamental lesson from Linux and Windows and OSX now takes its place in that too. You can keep the good things about Unix-y environments and opt out of the terrible parts of the Linux ecosystem.

Unfortunately, like BSDs, that's not what Docker is built around. Docker assumes a Linux kernel, and Linux kernel ABI is not the same as Unix kernel ABI. That's the biggest problem. Same as FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones... they're a decade ahead of docker in terms of capability, security, performance, and polish, but Docker is where the mindshare is. I can't install a jail from a registry with a single command and that's not where the support/development time is going even for the people who have engineered those alternative docker-registry solutions for jails.

The only "fast" option for non-linux kernels besides full virtualization is to thunk the calls to your own kernel to patch around the differences. Obviously that didn't work out with the Windows kernel, it's just too different, but FreeBSD/Solaris have implemented this functionality for a long time as part of "Branded Zones". But everyone is enthusiastically rebuilding the wheel around ubuntu (specifically - not even linux generally) so that's not going to happen.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/

(the freebsd handbook is a great example of the kinds of documentation that rarely gets written for linux distros - other than commercial ones - because of the overwhelming code churn and the inevitable bit-rot that entails in the rest of the user experience. It's way more fun to write a new audio pipeline or init system than to document it fully, everyone knows it.)

https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/it-infra...

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/817-1592/gchhy/index.ht...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers#Branded_zon...

(and note the Solaris stuff almost entirely applies to OpenSolaris/Illumos as well, you don't have to use commercial solaris to get Branded Zones.)

Anyway, apropos of nothing, but with the newfound attention on OS X from developers and power-users, it'd be really nice if Apple released a M1/M2-based "toughbook". Completely against their design aesthetic but I think a lot of people don't really like the idea of wafer-thin apple laptops and would like something that can take some bumps without shattering. Power users are becoming a more core demographic for macbooks and it'd be nice to see them cater a little more.

Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but switching to Docker to sequester my projects and their dependencies has saved me so much time and hassle, especially with the amount of repos I work on throughout the year.

My biggest weakness today is that I still don't reach for Docker right away when starting work on a new project or when evaluating a new tool. Old habits…

With a docker compose file in place, all I need to do is run "docker-compose" and everything is up and running.

It's such an upgrade over what we had before.